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La Trobe University Moves Its Finance System to the Cloud

02/11/16

As part of its strategic plan, La Trobe
University in Melbourne, Australia has moved its finance system to the
cloud, while reducing its paper-based processes and providing faster, simpler
reports and self-service functionality for staff and researchers.

Re-evaluating the University's Finance System

The university had been using the SAP ERP
Central Component (ECC) on-premise system since 1999, including SAP's Financial
Accounting and Controlling (FICO) system. Over the 16-year period the
university was using the system, it developed a significant number of
customizations and workarounds, which ultimately resulted in unnecessary
bureaucracy and inefficiencies, according to Peter Nikoletatos, executive
director and chief information officer of La Trobe.

Eighteen months ago, the university implemented its "Future-Ready Strategic
Plan," which is based on four pillars. Nikoletatos defines the first pillar,
called "Brilliant Basics," as "simplifying the end-to-end processes of the
everyday life of an end user at La Trobe university." The other three pillars
are Student Employability, Student Experience and Research Excellence. As part
of the strategic plan, the university consolidated seven faculties down to a
two-college model and re-evaluated some of its core systems, including its
finance system.

Selecting and Implementing a New Finance System

The university was already heavily invested in the SAP ecosystem, both in
terms of experience and architecture, so the administrators wanted to take that
investment to the next level while implementing initiatives that would support
its strategic plan. "We wanted to choose a solution that would be largely
integrated rather than interoperable, and by integrated I meant that it would
be seamless engagement with the product and the ecosystem," said Nikoletatos.
That decision-making process led the university to select SAP
Simple Finance running in the cloud on the SAP HANA in-memory computing
platform, making it the first organization to globally deploy SAP Simple
Finance in the cloud.

While La Trobe University is located in Melbourne, in southern Australia,
the system was hosted 600 miles away in Sydney. The university was concerned
about introducing latency issues by switching from an on-premise system to the
cloud, but according to Nikoletatos, "the performance is just as quick as if
it's on premise, in fact it's actually quicker," and he credits the speed of
the HANA platform for that low-latency.

Supporting the Future-Ready Strategic
Plan

In support of the "Brilliant Basics" pillar, the university streamlined
numerous processes. It reduced the number of coding blocks in its financial
system to reflect the consolidation of its seven faculties to a two-college
model, which simplified the process of coding expenses and reporting. It also
consolidated hundreds of customized reports down to five standard business
intelligence (BI) reports. And the university made the decision to use SAP
Simple Finance's processes without any customizations or workarounds. "By
saying, 'let's use the processes straight out of the box,' we simplified a lot
of the ways that we actually use the finance system," said Nikoletatos.

Although the new system did a great job supporting the pillar of Brilliant
Basics on many fronts, the pillar started to crumble when it came to reporting.
The university's initial implementation of Simple Finance relied on SAP's BusinessObjects
Web Intelligence, or Webi for short, as the primary reporting tool. "Webi's
a fantastic tool if you like comprehensive, almost like pivot-table-on-steroids
reporting that provides a lot of detail," said Nikoletatos. "But for a group of
our key researchers, they just wanted a very simple, graphical report which
basically said, against their grants or research projects, actual budget
variance and forecasts. So we overprovided in the reporting space."

To solve this problem, the university implemented two simplified reporting
tools to compliment Webi. One was Lumira, SAP's
self-service data visualization tool, which La Trobe staff can access from the
Web interface, and the other was Fiori, which staff can access on
their mobile device. "We're still interfacing with the same data source, but
the presentation layer is enormously different with Lumira and with Fiori,"
said Nikoletatos. "Lumira is probably best described as a staff portal of key
functions, so you have simple point-click to everything, and Fiori gives you
the highly mobile, easy to use, quick-information type of interface. With Webi
you've got a much more detailed reporting tool. It's great if you want to see
full detailed month-end reports, but not a tool that you want to definitely use
on a day to day basis."

Future Plans

Going forward, Nikoletatos wants to take greater advantage of the predictive
analytics capabilities of the new system. "While I'm happy with where we are
today, I still think there's much to do in the more predictive analysis
reporting tools," he said. "That's where I think our investment in the HANA
suite in the HCI [HANA Cloud Interface] early adoption program is going to draw
some really huge dividends for us over the next six to 12 months."

He also plans to do more work in support of the Student Employability and
Student Experience pillars of the strategic plan by embedding the SAP HANA
database into the university's curriculum. "We think the market in Australia
will be quite keen to deploy HANA-based solutions in the next few years," said
Nikoletatos. "We've got a strategic partner that's basically helping us embed
those technologies to give our students a competitive advantage, particularly
our students around engineering and mathematical sciences that come with that
kind of thought leadership."

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.